Intel Developer Forum 2007: Anniversary Edition. Page 2

IDF 2007 in San Francisco started this morning. The members of the press have been crowding in front of the keynote hall well over half an hour in advance, trying the get the best spots: the presentation promised to be very interesting: Penryn, Nehalem, the first working 32nm wafer, innovations in ultra mobility and power efficiency as well as breakthroughs in WiMAX technology. Read more in our coverage!

Silicon Process Technology

We are all familiar with 65nm silicon process technology:

But at some point Intel realized there were problems with it, because there were signal leakages. They started to look for new solutions and eventually offered a breakthrough: a new material-based insulator called Hafnium. They replaced silicon dioxide with this new gate. As a result, they reduced the gate leakage by the factor of 10:

This is what Paul called “the magic of 45nm”.

It is the latest silicon technology Intel is going into production with today. It will make Intel unique in terms of the power, performance, transistor density and the yields in the transistor industry. Thanks to this new technology Intel is making great headway on the next generation now and that why they were ready to demonstrate the world’s first 32nm wafer.

The product is fully functional, it is a 32nm SRAM chip, each die features 1.9 billion transistors.